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Archive for the ‘Tools and techniques’ Category

The holidays are coming! And we have a great gift idea for you: a beginning cartoonist’s starter kit! To get your special person started in comics, just use our checklist to buy him or her the basic tools of the trade.

Now that your students are approaching the final version of their Gag Cartoon, it’s time for some more drawing lessons. Nothing terribly complex, but these simple concepts can make all the difference in the work of a neophyte cartoonist, both in visual appeal and readability.

This is one of several features we had to drop from Mastering Comics for length, and will be posting here. For more like this, and better, check out the book! (For another sample of the kind of stuff that we just couldn’t shoehorn into our giant book, check out our guide to laying out bleeds.) Read More

We inaugurate a fantastic new series by Derek Mainhart, who is setting out to write up an entire year’s curriculum for a comics class at the secondary level: middle school and high school. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s going to be entertaining, well-planned, and incredibly useful.

Our editor on Drawing Words & Writing Pictures is the multi-talented Mark Siegel. He’s the creator of Sailor Twain, and often posts interesting observations on art and craft. A few months back he posted a couple of times on the art of Chinese calligraphy, and as Matt and I were recently thinking about sumi ink Read More

Kevin and Zander have collaborated on a number of comic books. This wouldn’t be unusual, except that they’ve developed an intensive style of collaboration, where each works on every stage of the comics, from conception to layouts (thumbnails), to pencils, to inks. Like French authors (who famously use a similar system) Dupuy & Berberian, they’ve evolved a consistent combined style where you really can’t tell where one’s work ends and the other begins.

Hilary Allison came in one day beaming because she’d cracked the Nib-Holding Industrial Complex’s iron grip on her student budget, and I encouraged her to throw a post together about it for you, dear readers. This is what she came up with.

What this book does, strikingly well, is it teaches you how to be a webcartoonist. From website design issues specific to comics, to personal branding, to dealing with fans (and making more of them) to preparing for conventions (checklists!) right down to setting up a shipping station for your merch, this is by far the most comprehensive, reasonable, serious guide to being a self-publisher that I’ve seen.

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FIRST SECOND is an imprint of Roaring Brook Press / Macmillan USA. Macmillan owns some of America's most prestigious publishers, known for great integrity and literary quality. These include Henry Holt, FSG, St Martin's Press, Tor and Picador, all of which have garnered the most coveted prizes in publishing.